Just had a thought while watching TNG.
In “Code of Honour,” the episode begins as stardate 41235.25. Then, after Natasha is captured, Picard voices that “one whole day” has gone by and the stardate is 41235.32. Does this mean one day in TNG is equal to 0.07 (stardate)? Or do the last 5 numbers have no meaning at all?
I know it’s a widely discussed issue in this community. Maybe I’m on the completely wrong track and maybe there is another consensus. But I thought it would spark conversation. Cheers!
I’m a big believer in “stardates are nonsense, and should remain nonsense,” but there were efforts made to standardize them in the '90s. They weren’t particularly consistent efforts, though. The full history can be found here.
In early TNG, this was the explanation:
By TNG season 6, they were going with:
I guess when you’re traveling around faster than the speed of light, time and date stop meaning the same thing as they do back home, so it stands to reason that you couldn’t map stardates to any standard calendar.
At least, that’s my new headcanon.
Stardates should be a standard calendar at least amongst themselves.
I suppose it could go either way. That would be true if we see stardates as a universal system that applies anywhere and everywhere. If we instead imagine them to include encoded information about local space time, it makes sense that they might be inconsistent but always moving forward.
I am, of course, using “makes sense” extremely loosely here.
It also removes an emphasis on any one particular planet’s day or year.
Hand successfully waved.
The headings / bearings they use are all over the place too, remember looking it up and it feels like the writers just picked whatever numbers best fit the flow / cadence of dialog they were looking for
And they nailed it especially with Sir Patrick Stuart’s short monologues.
Not always. On DS9, when the Defiant was departing the station, the heading was given as 180 mark zero - meaning, traveling exactly backward from their current position. This made sense because when docked, the Defiant’s nose is buried in the docking ring.
Yeah, some shows did have their own consistent-ish systems, but I think some shows used a system that seemed to be relative to the center of the solar system, others from the perspective of the ship (which makes more sense to me, like naval bearings) - https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Heading.
It was a quick lookup from a long time ago, I was working on a 3d space game and was curious if ST had a consistent model I could just use.
“4 stands for the 24th century” so… just a couple of centuries until another y2k style panic?